The integration of natural science and spirituality is accomplished by putting consciousness into the equations of the quantized relativistic model of reality. This approach, with a quantum calculus based on the precise empirical data provided by the Large Hadron Collider, leads to the discovery of gimmel, the non-physical third form that must exist in addition to mass and energy, in order for there to be a stable universe.

Thursday, August 30, 2018

A basic law of science, discovered by Mikhail Lomonosov in 1756, is the conservation of mass in physical
processes. Around 1850, James Clerk Maxwell intuited that mass and energy must
be equivalent. Other scientists, like Max Von Laue, James Prescott Joule and Lord
Kelvin agreed that this must be the case, and in 1905, Albert Einstein provided
mathematical proof that mass and energy are two forms of the same thing. The equivalence
of mass and energy is expressed by the simple equation E = mc2. With proof that mass and energy are
interchangeable, the law of conservation can be generalized to become the law
of conservation of the substance of reality.

In 1900, Max Planck intuited that “there is no matter as such”, and with
the discovery of gimmel, the third
form of reality in 2011,conservation of the
substance of reality becomes conservation of mass, energy and consciousness, the three interchangeable forms of reality, and
the mathematical logic of the Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions applied to
quantum physics, reveals that the existence of a universe as stable as the one
we experience is possible only if consciousness is primary and the essence of
mass, energy and consciousness is conserved in all processes. What does this
mean for human consciousness?

CONSERVATION
OF THE ESSENCE OF REALITY

AND
THE SURVIVAL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Conservation of Consciousness

If the essence of reality manifested as mass, energy and consciousness, is
conserved, then the essence of your consciousness and whatever you may have
achieved in your lifetime may not be lost. The question becomes: Is your
individual consciousness conserved, and if so, how? Could it be that
the physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects of consciousness are all preserved
in the DNA in which your being is encoded? The answer is yes. It is no accident that the organic compounds that make up DNA have
high levels of gimmel.

I’m not asking you to believe in reincarnation; I
am asking you to look at the question of survival with an open mind. Independent
studies show that about 51% of the world’s population believe in some form of
survival of consciousness after the death of the physical body, and about 24%
of Christians in the US believe in
reincarnation.But belief and knowing are two
different things.

What does science have to say about this? For
scientists who believe in the doctrine of materialism, the answer is that no
form of survival is possible. But to be scientific, we must recognize that materialism
is a belief, not a science. Belief in
materialism does not rise to the level of a scientific hypothesis because a
scientific hypothesis must be subject to proof or disproof. The belief that the
universe could exist as it does without consciousness cannot be tested because scientific
proof depends upon repeatable evidence and no reality can be observed, measured
or thought about without the existence of a consciousness.

Quantum experiments reveal that consciousness is actively
involved in the way reality manifests. As Nobel physicist John Wheeler put it:
“No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” Furthermore,
the discovery of gimmel has proved that no reality could have issued out of a
big-bang explosion without the involvement of the non-physical component we
call gimmel stabilizing atomic
structure.

On the other hand, the question of survivalis a valid scientific hypothesis because it can be tested against
evidence. Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia, and others, have
documented thousands of cases of children who remember past lives, not just in
families in places like India, where virtually everyone believes in
reincarnation, but also here in the US and other countries, in families with no
belief in reincarnation. But reincarnation, if it occurs, is not the simplistic
thing that most people take it to be, and in this article, we will see that most
arguments against it are based in subjective belief, not science.

HOW
REINCARNATION BECAME HERESY IN THE CHRISTIAN WORLD

An unbiased review of the history of organized
religious and political institutions reveals how and why knowledge of the
survival has been distorted and obscured in the West. The roots of Christianity
are found in the spiritual practices of the Judeans over 2,000 years ago, and today’s
Christian churches claim to embrace the teachings of Jesus, who was a Judean born
in the Holy Land, and their teachings have affected the world we inhabit today
in many ways. But it is a closely kept secret that reincarnation was widely
accepted at the time of Jesus, and there is no evidence that Jesus rejected
the idea. In fact, in scriptures quoting Jesus, we find references to the
reincarnation of Elijah, Elisha and others. The scriptures we have today have
been heavily edited and redacted by people in powerful positions in the
political and religious institutions to suit their own beliefs and political
agendas. They have distorted the teachings of Jesus and deleted certain parts
of his teachings from the Bible we have today.

Early
Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church

The Catholic Church claims St. Peter as their first
Bishop, or even the first Pope. The name Peter means rock, and Jesus said: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will
build my church”, but Peter was never part of the Catholic Church. He died
before there was a Catholic church. He was a Jew like Jesus, and was crucified by
the Romans in 67AD, during the reign of the Emperor Nero. He was
crucified in a horrific manner in the public square in Rome because he was a
known leader of people following the anti-Roman Jewish teachings of Jesus of
Nazareth.

There was no such entity as the Catholic Church at
the time of Peter’s execution. The term “Catholic” comes from the Greek word καθολικός, meaning universal, or “of the whole”. It was coined by
the Greek theologian Origen around 200 AD , some 130 years after Peter’s death.
From the time of Peter’s execution, the leaders of the Holy Roman Church
were appointed or elected by Rome, and until the end of the Roman Empire, Catholic
Popes were Roman or Greek, not Jewish, and they were controlled by Rome.

Because the teachings of Jesus challenged the
Olympian religion of the Roman state, the Emperor had Peter crucified, and
replaced him with Linus, a Roman. The early Christian Church
was renamed the Holy Roman Church, and was controlled by, and part of the
unholy Roman Empire. This was a political move by the Emperor to ensure that Rome
could control the followers of Jesus, a growing branch of Judaism that was seen
at the time by both Romans and orthodox Jews, as a radical cult.

Origen, a Greek, born in Alexandria, was the most
prolific Christian writer of the third century AD, producing more than 6,000
treatises on Christian philosophy and theology, including commentaries on the
Hebrew scriptures and the teachings of Jesus recorded in scriptures that became
known as the New Testament. He wrote about reincarnation in two of his major
treatises as follows:

"Each soul enters the world
strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defects of its past lives. Its
place in this world is determined by past virtues and shortcomings."

- From Origen’s “De Principalis”

"Is it not more in accordance with
common sense that every soul for reasons unknown - I speak in accordance with
the opinions of Pythagoras, Plato and Empedokles - enters the body influenced by its past deeds?
The soul has a body at its disposal for a certain period of time which, due to
its changeable condition, eventually is no longer suitable for the soul,
whereupon it changes that body for another." - Origen: “Contra
Celsum”

Origen was, and still is, regarded as one of the most important Christian
theologians of all time, and a founding father of the Catholic Church, yet few
modern Christians have even heard his name. Why were some of his documentation
of the teachings of Jesus eliminated
from Church doctrine? The answer is simple: It was not a Pope nor a member of
the priesthood who banned the doctrine of reincarnation from Church dogma, it
was the Emperor Justinian, about 500 years after the crucifixion of Jesus and
Peter.

By the year 500, the power of the Roman Empire was beginning to fade. The
Roman Emperors, like the rulers of civilizations before, had gained their power
and maintained it by brute force, and they claimed that the line of emperors
were direct descendants of the gods. They used the wealth gained by killing,
conquering and enslaving the peoples around them to glorify their gods and
their emperors as sons of gods. But, the Roman emperors were human, and their
absolute power quickly became absolute corruption.

The Emperor Justinian was a well-educated, ego-driven, evil man, known as
Justinian the Great, and he even became known as Saint Justinian in the Eastern
Greek Orthodox Church. But, his clearly stated goal was to “revive the Roman Empire's greatness and reconquer the
lost western half of the historical Roman Empire” . He knew the decline of
Rome’s influence was due in part to Christian teachings in anti-Roman groups,
mostly descendants of Jews who had been dispersed from Judea around 600 BC, and
coalesced under the teachings of Jesus. They claimed that Jesus was the Messiah
prophesied in ancient Jewish scriptures. Jesus was becoming a mythical character
challenging the authority of the Roman Empire.

When Justinian became Emperor, the decadence and debauchery of the rulers
of Rome was well known, and the ranks of the Judeo-Christians were steadily
growing. Justinian studied the writings of Origen,
the most influential of Christian theologians, and identified ideas that he
could use to control the followers of Jesus in the western provinces and
integrate them into the Roman theocracy that became the Catholic Church.

Justinian’s Anathemas Against Origen

The followers of Jesus constituted a serious threat to Justinian’s power.
Origen quoted Jesus, who had said: “Render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's”. And “All are sons of the most-high God”. Origen also articulated the
anti-Roman Christian belief that "Each soul enters the world strengthened by the victories or weakened by
the defects of its past lives. Its place in this world is determined by past
virtues and shortcomings." If people were allowed to believe that by
being virtuous, they could rise to the status of sons of God, a distinction
claimed by the Emperor, his power to control them would be threatened. Justinian
knew he must stamp out this heresy. The anathemas,
a list that he prepared for this purpose, read in part:

"Whosoever teaches the doctrine of a supposed pre-birth existence of the
soul, and speaks of a monstrous restoration of this, is cursed. Such heretics
will be executed, their writings burned, and their property will become the
property of the Emperor."

In 553 AD, the Emperor called for an assembly of the
Council of the Church Fathers to ratify the decree, but it was opposed by the
Pope. So, Justinian lured the Eastern Bishops into a secret meeting and presented
his ‘Anathemata’ condemning Origen’s writings.
He prevailed upon them, under threat of death, to sign the decree. This was a
bold ploy to undermine the Pope’s power and ban the offending writings of
Origen. The scheme worked. An official meeting of the Ecumenical Council was
held on the fifth of May 553, and the Pope was forced to accept the decree,
allowing the Emperor to issue it as if it were a cannon of the Church.

Throughout Europe and the Middle East, monks educated as scribes were put
to work expunging references to the transmigration of the soul from the
existing scriptures, so that Christian dioceses throughout the land would not risk
the wrath of Justinian, which they knew was very real. Where references to
reincarnation could not be eliminated without destroying passages vital to the
teachings of the Church, they were re-worded to imply spiritual, not physical
rebirth. No attempt was made to rectify Justinian’s repressive edict until
after the participants in the Council had passed away and even the memory of
the fact that reincarnation had once been part of Church doctrine had faded
from Christian thought.

If the Soul Survives, Are We
Reincarnations of Persons Who Lived in the Past?

You will have to
determine the answer to this question for yourself. Many people are positive
that they have had previous lives, and I personally have memories that seem to come
from lives lived in the past. The person I am today appears to be a composite of
past experiences, with minor personality traits from past lives faded into the
subconscious. I am the sum total of the experiences of numerous lives, with a
current personality overlay fashioned by my experiences in this life. It also
appears that new souls emerge from the process underlying physical reality as
older souls graduate this life and move on to higher dimensional domains.

Arguments Against Reincarnation:

Belief in the impossibility of reincarnation is a
difficult position to defend. You may have many reasons to believe that reincarnation cannot happen, and you may be able to
explain them very articulately, but it only takes one counter-example to prove
you wrong. As William James famously said: “If you
wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that
no crows are white; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”

There are Christians, Jews and Atheists who do
believe in reincarnation, but devout Muslims that I’ve known tell me that the
Koran only allows one resurrection, and that is on Judgement Day. However, some
Muslim holy men teach that multiple reincarnations do occur. One Sufi holy man
explained to me that Judgement Day is not just one day for all souls, but
occurs for each soul at the time of each death.

Interestingly, atheism and belief in reincarnation are not mutually
exclusive. An atheist can believe in reincarnation as a natural process that occurs
physically without requiring the existence of God. So even within groups that
generally do not believe in reincarnation, there are people who believe it happens.

Faith-Based Arguments

Faith-based arguments are not scientific arguments because they do not consider
reincarnation as a hypothesis; they start with the assumption of superior
knowledge. Arguments presented in this manner are circular because they assume
the negative conclusion they seek to prove. Such arguments are in defense of belief,
and are only acceptable if you share belief in the presenter’s faith. It is not
my intent to belittle anyone’s faith, or dismiss their arguments because of it,
but such arguments must be considered in their proper context.

Because I am writing in English, and live in a place and time where
Christianity is the most prevalent faith, I’ll focus on the Bible in its
historical context, and explain how the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible and
its many modern interpretations came to be.

The Origin and Evolution of English Versions of the
Bible

Justinian’s redactions of the writings of Origen, who was arguably the most
knowledgeable of early Christian theologians, have changed the Christian Bible
substantially. And, after Justinian, the Christian Bible has been re-interpreted
several times by less than perfect human beings. The King James Version of the
Bible, revered by the fundamental Protestants of the US Bible Belt where I grew
up, as the infallible word of God, was authorized by King James as the head of
the Church of England in 1604. But, the King James Version was not the first
translation of the Bible into English from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and
Greek. It was, in fact, the fourth.

The first English translation of the Bible, called “The Great Bible”, was
commissioned by King Henry VIII, hardly a model of Christian virtue. After his
first wife, Catherine, proved unable to bear him a son, Henry requested that
the Pope allow him to divorce Catherine and marry his mistress. The Pope
refused. In response, Henry renounced the Catholic Church, married his mistress,
and closed all of the Catholic monasteries in England, seizing the Church's assets and establishing the
Church of England with himself as its head. In 1536, literally thumbing
his nose at the Pope, he authorized the translation of the Bible into English as
the official Word of God, an
action strictly forbidden by Rome.
Henry continued to do whatever he pleased, producing children by various wives
and mistresses, and he imprisoned and tortured anyone who opposed him,
executing many, including two of his six wives.

The second English translation of the Bible was
the Geneva Bible, produced in1560. This came about when Henry VIII’s only
legitimate son, Edward VI, died after only six years on the Throne, and his
older sister Mary became
Queen. Mary was Catholic, and in order to re-instate the Catholic Church, she persecuted
and executed many English Protestants, earning the title "Bloody Mary”.
More than 800 English scholars fled to Europe to escape her wrath. They gathered
in Geneva Switzerland and produced a new Protestant version of the Bible.

The Geneva Bible reflected the thinking of a
movement of the time known as Calvinism, one of several emerging protestant
sects. The Geneva Bible was a threat to the Church of England because it
replaced control of the Church by Bishops appointed by the Monarch, with
government by lay elders.

After Bloody Mary’s death, her half-sister
Elizabeth, a Protestant, became Queen. As Queen, she was the head of the Church
of England. With her blessings, the Bishops of the Church of England denounced
the Roman Catholic Bible and the
Geneva Bible, as heretical and produced their own version, which became known
as the Bishops' Bible. Produced
under the authority of the Church of England in 1568, the Bishop's Bible
succeeded Henry the Eighth’s “Great Bible” as the official Bible of the Church
of England. The Bishop’s Bible was substantially revised in 1572, and with
changes in the spelling of Hebrew names in 1602, it became the base text for
the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, completed in 1611.

If this were anything but the Bible, no one
would imagine that it could possibly be the unaltered word of God as given in
the Torah, and the unaltered Gospel as spoken by Jesus. The KJV was another revision
of the scholarly works of Origen, already heavily redacted for political
purposes and ego-based agendas.

The KJV’s tortured past is unknown to most
Christians in the USA of my childhood, and probably to most Christians today. I
remember some of the good people of the hill country where I grew up when asked
how the KJV Bible could be the original word of God, given its history, said
something like: “Priests, Kings and scholars may be less than perfect, but the
changes were guided by God, because God would not allow his word to be
distorted! One pastor I talked with said that the KJV was “the only true word
of God.” I thought: Why would God choose power-hungry politicians, murders,
ego-maniacs, atheists, and adulterers to shape the Bible, instead of spiritual
people and scholars? But, I didn’t ask, because I knew the answer would be:
“God works in mysterious ways!” There is no arguing with that kind of logic!

The Koran, the Holy Book of Islam

A brief review of the history of the Bible has shown that arguments for or
against reincarnation based upon the Latin or English versions are
questionable, and the same can be said for arguments based on verses of the
Koran. The root word of Koran (in Arabic القران) is either ‘Q’ar’, meaning to collect, or
‘Q’ara’, meaning to recite. The Sacred Scriptures of Islam were not written by
Mohamed, they were recited. Several years after the Prophet died, his followers
began jotting their memories of the recitations on camel bones and scraps of
paper, which were at some point collected, hand-copied and bound into the form
of the book now known as the Holy Koran.

The revelation of the Koran (also spelled ‘Quran’ to approximate the
guttural sound of the Arabic consonant) began in 610 AD, when the angel Gabriel
(Arabic: جبريل, Jibrīl
or جبرائيل, Jibrāʾīl) appeared to Muhammad in Hira Cave near Mecca, and
recited verses of the Sura Iqra (al-`Alaq). Throughout his life, Muhammad
continued to receive revelations until his death in 632. The Quran as it exists
today was compiled into a book format by Zayd ibn-Thabit under Uthman, the
third Caliph, political leader of the Islamic Caliphate, a theocratic government,
sometime between 644 and 656.

Faith-based arguments are accepted as true by the faithful. But, a scientist
must remain skeptical of such arguments. Belief is not proof, and science must provide
proof before accepting a hypothesis as truth. Scientific truth cannot be based
on subjective experience or belief. Without proof, an idea, however appealing,
is just a hypothesis, a theory to be tested. So, we will leave faith-based
“proofs” and move on to non-sectarian arguments.

Non-Sectarian
Arguments

The most convincing non-sectarian arguments against reincarnation come
from materialists, atheists and agnostics. Materialists can accept that a
higher intelligence might emerge from an evolving physical universe, and an
agnostic, by definition, accepts the possibility of the existence of a higher
intelligence, but remains skeptical until he or she sees proof. Atheism, on the
other hand, is the negative position that there never was a god, is no god, and
never can be a god. Obviously, atheism is a belief, not a scientific
hypothesis, because it cannot be proved or disproved.

The fact that there are more people alive today than at any time in the
known past, is given by some skeptics as an argument against reincarnation, but
on closer examination, it does not eliminate reincarnation as a logical
possibility because, even if there were only a finite number of souls, the
assumption that all of them were incarnated at the same time is unwarranted. Many
more people have died during the recorded past than live on Earth today, so it
is possible that everyone alive today may have lived before. There is no
paradox of numbers.

Science, by definition, is a search for truth. To determine whether an
idea is true, false, meaningless, or beyond our ability to determine, a
scientist must first frame it in the form of a hypothesis that may be
falsified, like William James’ statement “all crows are black”. We can do that
with the following hypothesis:

The
consciousness of an individual sentient being is produced by that individual’s
physical body and brain, and does not exist without them.

If this hypothesis is true, then when the body and brain of an individual
cease to function, the consciousness of that individual is simply gone. It no
longer exists. But, as professor James pointed out, there is no need to look at
all of the arguments that may be made supporting a hypothesis. If there is even
one counter-example, the hypothesis is invalid.

Evidence for Reincarnation

As suggested in the first section of this article, a rational argument for
reincarnation can be based on the logic of the laws of cause and effect and
conservation of the stuff of reality. But the final verdict about reincarnation
depends on real evidence.

Scientific Evidence

The largest body of scientific evidence of
the survival and reincarnation of consciousness is found in the work of Dr. Ian
Stevenson (1918-2007). Dr. Stevenson was a professor
and research psychiatrist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for
50 years. He was Chair of the Department of Psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, the
Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and a Research Professor of
Psychiatry from 2002 until his death. He was also the founder and Director of
the University’s Division of Perceptual Studies.

Dr. Stevenson is
internationally recognized for documenting evidence that memories and even physical
characteristics are sometimes transferred from one lifetime to another. He
traveled extensively over a period of 40 years, investigating approximately 3,000
cases of children who recall past lives. His meticulous research revealed
evidence that children who recall past lives often have unusual abilities,
illnesses, phobias and knowledge which could not be explained by the
experiences of their current lives. The following summarizes a case
investigated by Dr. Stevenson.

The Case of Swarnlata Mishra

Swarnlata was born in Pradesh
India in 1948. When she was just three years old, she said she remembered a
previous life in Katni, a town more than 100 miles from her home. Her memories
contained details that enabled Dr. Stevenson to locate the family of the
deceased person she remembered being, and in the course of the investigation,
she articulated more than 50 specific facts that could be verified. She
said her name had been Biya Pathak, and that she had two sons. She recalled that
their home in Katni was white with black doors fitted with iron bars; four
rooms were stuccoed, but other parts were less finished; the floor was of stone
slabs. The house was in the Zhurkutia, District of Katni; a girl's school was
located behind the house, in front was a railway line, and lime furnaces were
visible from the house. She said the family had a motor car (a rarity in India in
the 1940’s). Swarnlata said that as Biya, she was treated in Jabalpur by Dr. S.
C. Bhabrat for a pain in her throat, and she died. All of these details,
written down when Swarnlata was three, were verified when she traveled to
Katni. Until then, the two families were unaware of each other’s existence.

Biya’s husband, son and eldest brother traveled
to the town where the Mishras lived to see if she really was a reincarnation of
Biya. They enlisted nine strangers to pose as family members. Swarnlata quickly
picked the real family members from the imposters and stopped in front of
Biya’s husband, lowering her eyes as Indian wives do in the presence of their
husbands. Many other verified facts are documented in the case file, and in Dr.
Stevenson’s book, “Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation” University Press
of Virginia.

Could this case be one “white crow” disproving the hypothesis that the
consciousness of an individual is produced by one physical body and brain? If
you accept the work of Dr. Stevenson, with the same level of skepticism of a
particle physicist reviewing evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson,
then you would have to say that it is. Critics of such investigations like to
use the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” made
popular by Carl Sagan; but just how extraordinary does the evidence have to be?
For some critics, no amount of evidence of reincarnation will ever be enough,
because, their objections are not scientific, they are belief-based. Dr.
Stevenson documented some 3,000 cases, most of which are difficult, if not
impossible to explain in any other way. Reincarnation is a fundamental belief
of 1.4 billion people (Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Taoists, Sikhs, etc.) and according to data released by the Pew Forum on Religion
and Public Life from a 2009 survey, 24 percent of American Christians believe
in reincarnation. Maybe it’s not so extraordinary as we think.

Credible
Evidence from Adults

Dr. Stevenson’s investigations focused on
children for a very good reason: As a scientist in a society that rejects the
idea of reincarnation, in order to undertake a serious investigation of the
hypothesis, he had to approach the hypothesis as a true skeptic, assuming that
the hypothesis might be either true or false. As a medical doctor and
psychiatrist, he knew that the clarity of the memory of an event usually fades
with the passage of time, and therefore, if it is possible that some people
live more than one life, and some memories of the deceased can carry over into
the brain of a newly born body, then it is most likely to surface shortly after
birth, and to be expressed as soon as the child begins to talk.

When memories of a past life occur to an adult,
he or she may suppress or exaggerate them, depending on societal conditioning
and personal beliefs. Dr. Stevenson was breaking new ground for western
science, so he could not allow preconceived beliefs or opinions about why, or
how reincarnation might occur, affect the investigations. But we can ask: Are there
adults who remember past lives?

Famous People Who Remember Past Lives

The list below is only a partial list,
consisting of quotes that are readily
available from public statements and published writings.

Benjamin
Franklin

“When
I see nothing annihilated (in the works of God) and not a drop of water wasted,
I cannot suspect the annihilation of souls, or believe that He will suffer the
daily waste of millions of minds ready-made that now exist, and put Himself to
the continual trouble of making new ones. Thus, finding myself to exist in the
world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist; and, with all
the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition
of mine, hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.”
- AZQuotes.com, Wind and Fly LTD, 2018.
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1138496, accessed August 29, 2018.

Henry
Ford

“I
adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty-six. Religion offered
nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work
is futile if we cannot utilize the experience we collect in one life in the
next. When I discovered Reincarnation, it was as if I had found a universal
plan. I realized that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer
limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. Genius is
experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit
of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they
know more. The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve
a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I
would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life
gives to us.”

- The San
Francisco Examiner, 1928

General
George S. Patton

This American World War II general spoke of
memories of a number of past lives There are numerous reports of General Patton
talking about reincarnation. He believed that he had always been a warrior in
one form or another. During World War I, he told his mother that he had
been reincarnated. Later in life, he said: “So
as through a glass and darkly, the age long strife I see, Where I fought in
many guises, many names, but always me.” – From the poem Through a Glass Darkly by General
Patton, 1922.

Paramahansa Yogananda

The founder of Self-Realization Fellowship wrote
in his Autobiography of a Yogi”:

“I find my earliest memories covering the
anachronistic features of a previous incarnation. Clear recollections came to
me of a distant life in which I had been a yogi amid the Himalayan snows. These
glimpses of the past, by some dimensionless link, also afforded me a glimpse of
the future.” – Autobiography of a Yogi,
Chapter 1, page 3, 12th edition, 1987.

Salvador
Dali

The famous Spanish artist remembered several of
his previous lives. He spoke of being St. John of the Cross in a previous life:
“as for me, … I am also the reincarnation of one of the greatest of all Spanish mystics, Saint John of the Cross.
I can vividly remember my life as Saint John . . . of
experiencing divine union, of undergoing the dark night of the
soul . . . I can remember many of Saint John’s fellow
monks. – The Secret Life of Salvador Dali,
an Autobiography, 1942.

Shirley MacLaine

“When I walked across
Spain on the pilgrimage called the Santiago de Compostela Camino, I
encountered myself in a former life. I discovered a part of me that lead to a
greater understanding of myself. I also realized the karmic importance of some
of the people that have been close to me in this existence. These realizations,
and numerous others, have helped, inspired and added to my whole being. They
have assisted in my better understanding myself and those around me. It doesn't
matter if this type of realization is imagination or if it is memory. It is a
truth that I have experienced on some level, in some form of reality and I
embrace it as a gift from the Divine.

“Three quarters of the
Earth's people believe they have lived before and will live again; thereby
enabling their Soul's journey a continuous learning experience. Stories abound
regarding how people find each other again - for good or otherwise.” – Shirley
MacLaine’s website: https://shirleymaclaine.com

Sylvester
Stallone
Sly Stallone is sure he had at least four past lives, and he experienced a
gruesome end in one of them. In an interview early in his career, he said, “I’m
quite sure I lost my head in the French Revolution.” His success with his
screen persona Rocky Balboa may have something to do with Stallone’s
claim that he was actually once a boxer who was killed by a knockout punch in
the 1930s. – People Magazine interview, June 21, 1982

John
Lennon

“I’m not afraid of death because I
don’t believe in it. It’s just getting out of one car, and into another.”

George Harrison"Friends are all souls that we've known in
other lives. We're drawn to each other. Even if I have only known them a day,
it doesn't matter. I'm not going to wait till I have known them for two years,
because anyway, we must have met somewhere before, you know."

Edgar Cayce

According
to those who knew the ‘Sleeping Prophet’ and studied his readings, “Edgar Cayce found that the concept of reincarnation was
not incompatible with any religion, and actually merged perfectly with his own
beliefs of what it meant to be a Christian. Eventually the subject of
reincarnation was examined in extensive detail in over 1,900 Life Readings.”- Edgar Cayce on Reincarnation, https://www.edgarcayce.org/media/8610/edgar-cayce-on-reincarnation.pdf/

Mark Twain

“I have been born more times
than anybody except Krishna.” – Charles Neider, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1958.

Carl Jung

"This
concept of rebirth necessarily implies the continuity of personality. Here the
human personality is regarded as continuous and accessible to memory, so that,
when one is incarnated or born, one is able, at least potentially, to remember
that one has lived through previous existences, and that these existences were
one's own, i.e., that they had the same ego form as the present life. As a
rule, reincarnation means rebirth in a human body.

"What happens
after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do
not suffice to form even an appropriate conception of it... The dissolution of
our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning."

William James

Renowned American
psychologist and philosopher, William James delivered a significant
science-based lecture, called "Human Immortality", at Harvard, in
1893. He later expanded his concepts to specifically include reincarnation. On
this he wrote:

"... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the earth
had those experiences." -

Ralph
Waldo Emerson

"The soul comes from
without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it
anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal. It is the secret of the world
that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from site and
afterward return again... Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive; nor John,
nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them
all, and could easily tell the names under which they go."

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau wrote in
"Letters":
"I lived in Judea eighteen
hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among
my contemporaries."

Jack London

London, author, best known for
book “Call of the Wild”, wrote:"I did not begin when I was born, nor when
I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads
of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in
me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born."

Walt
Whitman

In "Song of Myself", the famous
poet wrote:"And as to you,
Life, I reckon you are the leaving of many deaths, (No doubt I have died myself
ten thousand times before.)"

Albert
Schweitzer

"Reincarnation contains a
most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought
surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe."

Thomas H. Huxley wrote in "Essays Upon Some
Controverted Questions":"I am certain
that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return
a thousand times."

Voltaire"It is not more
surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is
resurrection."

Arthur Schopenhauer"Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition
of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which
is haunted by the incredible delusion
that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first
entrance into life."

Napoleon
Bonaparte

The “Little” Emperor believed that he had been
born many times. He is reported to have discussed who he had been in
previous lives with many people. Napoleon died in 1821. Twenty-eight years
later, Adolf Hitler was born. Both men were Catholic, both tried to take
over Europe using the same methods, fought Russia to a loss, and were defeated
in nearly the same way. Both were also considered to be the anti-Christ
during and after their lives by many people. Could it be Hitler was Napoleon
reincarnated?

Cicero

A Roman Nobleman (106 B.C. - 43 B.C.) who is
considered one of the great philosophers of that time. In his composition,
"On Old Age", he wrote:

"The soul is
of heavenly origin, forced down from its home in the highest, and, so to speak,
buried in earth, a place quite opposed to its divine nature and its
immortality... It is again a strong proof of men knowing most things before
birth, that when mere children they grasp innumerable facts with such speed as
to show that they are not then taking them in for the first time, but
remembering or recalling them."

Josephus

(Well-known Jewish historian from the time of
Jesus)"All pure and holy spirits live on in
heavenly places, and in course of time they are again sent down to inhabit
righteous bodies."

Jesus of Nazareth

Perhaps most shocking for Christians, is evidence
that Jesus accepted reincarnation and discussed it with his disciples. Under the
edict of Justinian, monastic scribes expunged overt references to reincarnation
from the New Testament, but some references that could be explained as specialcircumstances remain. For example, from Luke 9:18 – 21:

And it came to pass, as he was alone praying,
his disciples were with him: and he asked them, saying, whom say the people
that I am?

They, answering said, John the Baptist; but
some say, Elijah; and others say, that one of the old prophets is risen again.

This is a clear reflection that people in Jesus’ day believed in
reincarnation.

And in Matthew 17:10-13:

And the disciples asked him, saying, “Why then do the scribes say
that Elijah must come first?” But he answered them and said, “Elijah indeed is
to come and will restore all things. But I say to you that Elijah has
come already, and they did not know him, but did to him whatever they wished. So
also shall the Son of Man suffer at their hand.” Then the disciples
understood that he had spoken of John the Baptist.

This is a clear reference to the reincarnation of Elijah as John the
Baptist.

In addition to the texts
that became part of the Christian Bible, texts written around the time of Jesus
by the Gnostics also recorded the teaching
of Jesus; but because they contained references to reincarnation and other
things the religious institutions did not want propagated, they were banned by Christian
authorities as too Jewish, and by Jewish authorities as too Christian.

Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: γνωστικός, gnostikos, "having
knowledge", from γνῶσις gnōsis, knowledge) is a name
given to the ancient religious ideas of Judeo-Christian groups in the first and second century AD. The earliest Christian sects from the time of Jesus
believed in the Gnostic doctrine of emanation from one eternal Source: the idea
that all individuals have their origin in God, and all have, in their inmost
being, an eternal spark of God. They taught that the material world is sustained by emanations from God,
and that there exists within each human body a Divine spark that can be
gradually liberated in the course of lifetimes by the attainment of gnosis,
i.e., true knowledge.

Gnostic Christians taught that periodic saviors of
the world were able to rekindle the divine spark in those in whom it had gone
out. But organizers of the political doctrine that became the basis of the
Catholic Church held that man was created as a physical being, not a
spiritual one. Man, therefore, has no intrinsic connection to God, no
divine spark through which he can reach God.

Rejecting theoriginal Christian
teachings that held that the soul is spiritual and immortal, an idea documented
byChurch Fathers Clement of Alexandria and Origen, later Church theologians
developed the concept of creatio ex nihilo, or creation
out of nothing. This belief in something from nothing is also reflected in science
in the belief in the big-bang origin of all things as originally posited by physicalists.

Conclusions Regarding the
Reincarnation Hypothesis

As a scientist, I am, by profession a
skeptic. This means that I must consider the reincarnation of any conscious
being, including myself, from past living bodies into current living bodies, as
a hypothesis, something to be proved or disproved. But, I believe the evidence is
strongly suggestive that many of us have been here before, and may return again
and again, until we have evolved spiritually to the point where we may
transcend the limitations of physical
existence into ecstatic reunion with Cosmic Consciousness.

From memories of past lives, we can begin to piece together a picture of
how reincarnation works. It appears there are ‘old’ souls, like Mark Twain; there
are ‘younger’ souls, like Shirley McLaine, and many more ‘young’ souls who do
not consciously remember past lives at all. The laws of cause and effect govern
the physical aspects of reincarnation, including the when, where and how of
birth, social and economic position in life and death, but have no effect on
the essence of consciousness, which is the heart of each soul. Evidence
strongly suggesting this is found in the case studies of Dr. Ian Stevenson, in
the documented readings of Edgar Cayce, in the writings of Paramahansa
Yogananda and others. Core aspects of an individual, including enlightenment
attained, are carried over, but are not necessarily remembered or displayed for
all to see in this lifetime. You may recognize friends and foes of the past incarnate
in this life, which can be helpful in maintaining and improving your focus and
awareness amid the challenges and struggles of this life.

I have had a number of distinct personal memories and experiences that are
suggestive of lives in specific past time periods, and some have been
validated. I think it is possible that memories of past lives are recorded in
the mass. energy and consciousness of DNA, and under certain circumstances, they
may be accessed by the current conscious brain. None of the laws of nature
discovered so far, tell us that anything is ever created from nothingness or
destroyed absolutely, there is only change. Why should consciousness be an
exception? I do not believe that my consciousness appeared from nothingness in
1936, and will cease to exist sometime in the future, because there is no
evidence that the mass/energy substance of reality is created or destroyed. The
discovery of gimmel strongly suggests that the same is true for
consciousness. Change occurs, but there
is no basis to think reality will ever cease to exist. When the body I
currently occupy dies, the essence of the I that I am will simply move on,
hopefully to increasingly higher levels of consciousness.

One of the most basic laws of science, discovered by Russian scientist
Mikhail Lomonosov in 1756, is the conservation
of mass. Around 1850, James Clerk Maxwell intuited that there must be a
natural mass-energy equivalence. Other 1800-1900 scientists, like Max Von Laue,
James Prescott Joule and Lord Kelvin agreed that this must be the case, and in
1905, Albert Einstein provided the theoretical basis and the mathematical proof,
defining the equivalence of mass and energy with the simple equation E = mc2.

With the discovery of Gimmel as the third form of the essence of reality,
the conservation of mass, energy and
consciousness is a logical extension of the law of conservation. The
mathematical logic of the Calculus of Dimensional Distinctions applied to
quantum physics in TDVP, reveals the fact that the existence of a universe as
stable as the one we experience proves that consciousness is primary. Therefore,
TDVP suggests that we must conclude that the essence of mass, energy and
consciousness is conserved in all processes in the universe. What does this
mean for human consciousness. For you and me?

CONSERVATION
OF THE ESSENCE OF REALITY

AND
THE SURVIVAL OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Conservation of Consciousness

Because the essence of reality, whether manifested as mass, energy or
consciousness, is conserved, it stands to reason that the essence of your
consciousness and whatever progress toward enlightenment and Cosmic
Consciousness you may have achieved in your lifetime is not lost. The question,
and it is a very important one,
becomes: how is the consciousness of the soul conserved, and in what form?
It is likely, in my opinion, that the physical, intellectual and spiritual
aspects of consciousness are all preserved in the DNA in which your being is
encoded because the organic compounds that make up DNA have very high levels of
gimmel content.

If you are not one of the estimated 1.5 billion
people on the planet who believe in reincarnation, I am not asking you to
believe in reincarnation. I’m asking you to look at the question of survival with
an open mind. Put whatever you may have been taught by your parents, your
religion or mainstream science, and whatever you think you know, aside for a
moment, and look at the evidence. Are human souls reincarnated? More than half,
about 51% of the world’s population believe in some form of survival of
consciousness after the death of the physical body, and about 24% ofChristians in the US believe in
reincarnation. But belief and knowing are two different things. How can we
prove or disprove the hypothesis of the survival of consciousness and/or the reincarnation
of souls?

What does mainstream science have to say about it? For
those scientists who have accepted the metaphysical belief system of
materialism, the answer is that no form of survival is possible. But if one is a
scientist, one must recognize that materialism is a belief, not science. The belief that the universe would exist as it
does with or without consciousness does not rise to the level of a scientific
hypothesis because a scientific hypothesis must be subject to proof or
disproof. The belief that the universe could exist without consciousness cannot
be proved because proof depends upon repeatable evidence of observation,
measurement and logic, and no reality can be observed, measured or thought
about without the existence of a conscious observer. Quantum experiments show
that consciousness is directly involved in the way reality manifests in the real
world. As physicist John Wheeler said: “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon
until it is an observed phenomenon.” Furthermore, the discovery of gimmel has
proved that no reality could have evolved out of a big-bang explosion without
the involvement of non-physical gimmel acting as a conscious organizer of
stable atoms.

On the other hand, the hypothesis that
consciousness survives the death of the physical body is a valid scientific
hypothesis because it can be tested and proved or disproved. The evidence for
it is more logical, well-founded, documented, and convincing than the evidence
for the existence of the Higgs boson, or any particle of the particle zoo,
other than the electron! Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia and
many others since, have documented over 3,000 cases of children who have
remembered past lives, not just in families in places like India, where
virtually everyone believes in reincarnation, but also in families, here in the
US and other countries, with no belief in reincarnation. The scientific
evidence is actually overwhelming, but reincarnation, if it exists, cannot be
the simplistic thing that people who try to disprove it, take it to be. The
common arguments used against it here in the West are based in belief, not
science, and they are easily debunked. I’ll address some of the most prevalent
ones here, but first, I must provide a little background.

HOW
REINCARNATION BECAME HERESY IN THE CHRISTIAN WORLD

The
Interpretations of the Teachings of Jesus of Nazareth

Survival of the essence of the soul, or human
consciousness is one of the simplest, yet most obscured and misunderstood ideas
there is. One has to pursue an unbiased, open-minded study of the history of
the organized religious and political institutions of this world to understand
why and how ideas regarding the
survival of the soul taught by Jesus and others have been distorted and
obscured. The roots of Christianity, for example, are found in the spiritual
practices of the Judeans of whom Jesus was one, over 2,000 years ago. Today’s
Christian institutions profess to embody the teachings of Jesus, who was born
in a Jewish community in the area we call the Holy Land, and, if the history
pieced together by Jewish and Christian archeologists and Biblical scholars is
correct, he affected the world we inhabit today in many important ways.

It is well-documented that the rebirth of souls was
a basic belief of Judaism before the time of Jesus, and there is no evidence
that Jesus discounted or rejected the idea, nor did any of his followers who
lived during his lifetime. In fact, in documents quoting Jesus, we find oblique
references to the reincarnation of Elijah, Elisha and others, even in the
highly redacted and altered versions of the scriptures that we have today. Once
you realize that the scriptures we call the Bible today have been heavily
edited by non-believers in powerful positions in the political and religious
institutions of the past, and changed multiple times to suit their political
and philosophical agendas, you can begin to see how some of the original
teachings of Jesus were distorted and, in some cases, even deleted from the
scriptures we have today.

The Roman Catholic Church claims that St. Peter was
the first leader of the Catholic Church, because the name Peter means rock, and
Jesus said “Thou art Peter, and upon this
rock I will build my church”, but it is very unlikely that Peter was ever
actually part of the Roman Catholic Church during his lifetime because Peter,
like Jesus, was a Jew, and he was crucified in Rome, by Romans, in 67AD,
during the reign of the Emperor Nero. He was crucified in a horrific manner in
the public square in Rome because he was identified as the Jewish leader of
people following the anti-Roman teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

The teachings of Jesus challenged the Olympian religion
of the Roman state, and after the Emperor had Peter crucified, he replaced him immediately,
according to Church historical records, with Linus, a Roman, and the early
Christian church was renamed the Holy Roman Church, and was controlled by, and
part of the Roman Empire. It
is obvious to any objective observer that this was a political move by the
Emperor and the Roman government, to ensure that they could control of the followers
of Jesus. Groups that became known as Christians formed a rapidly growing
branch of Judaism, that was seen at the time, by both Romans and orthodox Jews,
as a radical Jewish cult.

There was no such entity as the Catholic church at
the time of Peter’s execution in 67AD. The term “Catholic” comes from the Greek
word καθολικός,
meaning universal, or “of the whole”.
It was coined by the Greek theologian Origen around 200 AD, some 130 years
after Peter’s death. From the time of Peter’s execution, the Popes of
the Holy Roman Church were either appointed or elected by Rome, and until the
end of the Roman Empire, Popes were either Roman or Greek, controlled by Rome
to give the Church credibility in the eyes of Roman citizens.

For several hundred years, Christian teachings
included numerous references to reincarnation, as they had from the beginning
as a dissenting sect of Judaism. Origen, a Greek born in Alexandria, was the
most prolific Christian writer of the third century AD, producing more than
6,000 treatises on Christian philosophy and theology, including commentaries on
the Hebrew Bible and the teachings of Jesus recorded in scriptures that became
known as the New Testament, as well as several other scriptures later rejected
by the Catholic Church as too Jewish or too pagan. He wrote about reincarnation
in two of his major treatises as follows:

"Each soul enters the world
strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defects of its past lives. Its
place in this world is determined by past virtues and shortcomings."

- From Origen’s work: “De Principalis”

"Is it not more in accordance with
common sense that every soul for reasons unknown - I speak in accordance with
the opinions of Pythagoras, Plato and Empedokles -enters the body influenced by its past deeds?
The soul has a body at its disposal for a certain period of time which, due to
its changeable condition, eventually is no longer suitable for the soul,
whereupon it changes that body for another." - From “Contra
Celsum”

Origen was, and still is, to this day, highly regarded as one of the most
important Christian theologians of all time, and a founding father of the
Catholic Church. So how did some of his writings about the teachings of Jesus,
especially the belief in the survival and continuation of souls get so
vociferously eliminated from Church doctrine? The answer may surprise you: It
was not a Pope nor any member of the Catholic priesthood who banned the
doctrine of reincarnation from Church dogma, it was Justinian, Emperor of the
Roman Empire.

By the year 500, the power and influence of the Roman Empire was beginning
to fade. The Emperors of Rome, like the rulers of many civilizations before
them, had gained their power by use of brute force and violence, and had
maintained it by force, claiming that the line of emperors were direct
descendants of the gods, i.e., in this case, Zeus and company. They used their
wealth gained by killing, conquering and converting the peoples around them to
slaves to perpetuate and glorify their gods and images of their emperors as
descendants of the gods. But, in the end, they were only human after all, and
their absolute power gradually became absolute corruption.

The Emperor Justinian was a clever, well-educated and thoroughly ego-driven evil man,
also known as Justinian the Great, and he would even become known as Saint
Justinian in the Eastern Greek Orthodox Church. But, his stated goal was to “revive the Roman Empire's greatness and reconquer the
lost western half of the historical Roman Empire”. In his mind, the decline of
Rome’s influence in the western part of the Empire was due in large part to the
ascending influence of Christian teachings, as disparate anti-Roman groups,
mostly descendants of the Jews, who had been dispersed from Judea around 600
BC, had coalesced under the teachings of a Jew who claimed to be the Jewish
Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus the Christ was becoming a mythical legend,
challenging the divinity of the line of Roman Emperors. Justinian was smart
enough to see that he couldn’t openly declare war on the offending churches, so
he cleverly plotted to undermine their influence and integrate them into the
Roman theocracy.

By the time of Justinian, the decadence and debauchery of the rulers of
the Roman Empire had been well-known for hundreds of years, and the ranks of
the Judeo-Christian Religious Sect had also been steadily growing during the
same period of time. He carefully studied the
writings of Origen, the most influential of the Christian theologians, and
picked out a list of ideas found in Origen’s writings that he could use to
subvert the teachings in the western provinces and integrate them into the Roman
theocracy.

Justinian’s Anathemas Against Origen

Justinian realized that some of the teachings of the followers of Jesus
constituted a serious threat to his power; e.g., according to Origen, Jesus had
said: “Render unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's”. And “All are
sons of the most-high God”. And Origen had also written: "Each soul enters the world strengthened by
the victories or weakened by the defects of its past lives. Its place in this
world is determined by past virtues and shortcomings." Such teachings
were in direct conflict with what Justinian saw as his divine right to rule the
world, so he seized on this statement and related ideas in Christian doctrine,
as documented by Origen, that undermined the Roman ruler’s claim of divinity.
If people were led to believe that by being virtuous, they could rise to the
level of an Emperor, i.e., to the status of a god, or sons and daughters of
God, then the Emperor’s power would be seriously threatened. He decided that he
must declare this idea to be heresy and take strong measures to stamp it out. The
anathemas, an edict that he prepared
for this purpose, read in part:

"Whosoever teaches the doctrine of a supposed pre-birth existence of the
soul, and speaks of a monstrous restoration of this, is cursed. Such heretics
will be executed, their writings burned, and their property will become the
property of the Emperor."

In 553 AD, the Emperor called for an immediate assembly
of a Council of the Church Fathers to ratify the decree, but the meeting of the
Council was opposed by the Pope. The Emperor then cleverly forced several Eastern
bishops to attend a secret meeting where he presented his ‘Anathemata’ to them, condemning much of Origen’s writings. He
prevailed upon them, under threat of death, to sign the decree. The meeting
with the bishops prior to the Council was a bold ploy to undermine the Pope’s
power and promote the ban on the teachings of Origen. The scheme worked. An
official meeting of the Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church was held on
the fifth of May 553, and the Pope was forced to accept the decree, allowing
the Emperor to issue the ban as if it were imposed by the Pope, the Council of
Bishops and the Catholic Church.

As a result, throughout Europe and the Middle East, a group of monks
educated as scribes were hurriedly put to work, urgently expunging all
references to the pre-birth existence and transmigration of the soul from all
of the existing versions of Biblical scripture, so that Christian dioceses
throughout the land would not risk the wrath of Justinian, which they knew was
a very real threat. The purge of references to rebirth was very thorough, and
where it could not be eliminated without destroying whole passages vital to the
teachings of Jesus and the Judean prophets, it was re-worded to imply a
spiritual rebirth, not a physical one.

In this way, the ban on the belief in reincarnation was brutally forced
into Church doctrine, and no attempt was made to rectify Justinian’s
self-serving actions until after the participants in the Council of 553 had
passed away and even the memory of the fact that belief in reincarnation had once
been part of Church doctrine had faded from the consciousness of the Christian
world.

So, are You the Reincarnation of a
Person Who Lived in the Past?

I can’t answer this
question for you. You will have to search your consciousness and determine the answer
to this question for yourself. My wonderful soulmate Jacqui has had memories of
past lives and, due to recent revelations while hospitalized, will serve as a
messenger for many as never before. As for me, in deep meditation, I see the essential
consciousness of several people, at least six or seven, who lived in the past, surviving
in my consciousness, but, the person I am today is a composite of the basic
spiritual nature of people of the past and the changes wrought by the
experiences of this life. It appears that many of the personality traits,
habits and minor characteristics unique to their lifetimes faded with the
demise of their physical bodies and brains. So, my conclusion is that I am the
sum total of spiritual experiences of numerous past and present lives, with a
current cultural overlay fashioned by my personal experiences in this life, - not
the simple reincarnation of a person or persons who lived in the past. It is
also my impression that the infinite intelligence underlying reality may be
drawing forth new souls as older souls learn the lessons of this Earth life and
move on. I believe that this is in general agreement with Origen’s
documentation of the teachings of Jesus.

Arguments Against Reincarnation

With this brief historical background, let’s look at the most common
arguments put forth against the reincarnation hypothesis by some Christians,
Jews, Muslims, Agnostics, Atheists, and Materialists today. Interestingly, the
belief that reincarnation cannot be possible is one of the few things that some
members of all of these groups might agree on - but for quite different
reasons. Before we get into the arguments against reincarnation, some general
observations are in order.

First, arguing that reincarnation does not or
cannot occur, is an attempt to prove a negative. It certainly is not impossible
to prove a negative, but it is generally much more difficult than proving a
positive proposition. It is also a difficult and even dangerous position to
defend logically because you may have dozens of reasons why you believe reincarnation does not happen,
and you may be able to spend hours explaining each one of them very
articulately, but it only takes one indisputable example to prove you wrong. As
William James famously said: “If you wish to upset
the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are
white; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”

Second, there are Christians, Jews and Atheists who
do believe in reincarnation, but most devout Muslims will tell you that a
Muslim cannot believe in multiple reincarnations, because the Koran only allows
one, and that, according to the Prophet Mohamed, happens on Judgement Day.
However, some Muslim holy men who claim to have attained enlightenment, teach
that reincarnation does happen. One such holy man explained to me that
Judgement Day is not just one day for all souls but occurs for each soul at the
time of each death. When I asked him about the verses in the Koran that seem to
dispute that, he said: “The words of the Prophet Mohamed, may He rest in peace, are for the common man, not enlightened
saints.”

Third, Atheism and belief in reincarnation are not mutually exclusive. An
Atheist can believe in reincarnation as a natural process that may occur
without requiring the existence of a god. So even within groups that generally
do not believe in reincarnation, there are people who do believe in
reincarnation. With that, let’s turn to the arguments against reincarnation.
There are plenty to be found in books and articles, and on the internet.

Faith-Based Arguments

Faith-based arguments are usually not scientific arguments because they do
not begin by considering reincarnation as a hypothesis to be proved or
disproved. They start with the assumption of superior knowledge, by basing
their argument on specific scriptures, such as verses of the Torah, Koran or
Bible, which they consider to be the Word of God. Unfortunately, arguments
presented in this manner are circular because they have already assumed the
negative conclusion they seek to prove. Such arguments are simply arguments in
defense of a point of faith, and therefore can be accepted or rejected,
depending on whether or not you share a belief in the dogma of the presenter’s
faith.

It is not my intent to belittle anyone’s faith, or
to dismiss their arguments against reincarnation because of it, but such proofs
must be considered in their proper context. The person who presents faith-based
arguments is relying on what he/she believes to be unimpeachable authority.
Because I am writing in American English, and because I live in a place and
time where Christianity is the prevalent faith, I will first put the Bible, the
written authority upon which Christians rely, into its historical context. In
other words, let’s look at how the Bible, in particular the King James Version
(KJV) and its many modern re-interpretations, came to be what they are today.

The Origin and Evolution of English Versions of the
Bible

Arguments depending upon the belief that specific scriptures are the
infallible word of God should be viewed with some skepticism, because, as we’ve
seen, the elimination of the teachings of Origen, arguably the brightest of the
early church theologians, by the Roman Emperor Justinian’s ban, has changed the
content of the Christian Bible substantially. And, if we accept the claim that
the scriptures upon which the New Testament is based were originally the word
of God, spoken by Jesus Christ, a truly Enlightened Being, then we still must
recognize that it has come down the ages through the lenses of many less than
perfect human beings.For example, the
King James Version of the Bible, revered by the fundamental Protestants of the
hill country where I grew up, as the infallible word of God, was authorized by
King James as the head of the Church of England in 1604. But, the King James
Version was not the first translation of the Bible into English from the
original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. It was, in fact, the fourth.

The first English translation of the Bible, called “The Great Bible”, was
commissioned by King Henry VIII, hardly a model of Christian virtue. After his
first wife, Catherine proved unable to bear him a son, Henry requested that the
Pope allow him to divorce Catherine and marry his mistress. The official
position of the Catholic Church was that divorce was a sin, so the Pope
refused. In response, Henry renounced the Catholic Church and married his
mistress. He then proceeded to close all of the Catholic monasteries in
England, seize the Church's assets
and establish the Church of England with himself as its head, and in
1536, as an act of defiance, literally thumbing his nose at the Pope, he
authorized the translation of the Bible into English as the official Word of
God, an action strictly
forbidden by Rome. Henry continued
to do whatever he pleased, producing children by various wives and mistresses,
trying to obtain a male heir, and he imprisoned and tortured anyone who opposed
his actions, even executing many, including two of his six wives.

The second English translation of the Bible,
now almost forgotten, was the Geneva Bible, produced in 1557 to1560. This
version of the Bible came about when Henry the Eighth’s only legitimate son,
Edward VI, died after only six years on the Throne, and his older sister Mary became Queen of England and Ireland
from 1553 to 1558. Mary was Catholic, and in order to re-instate the Catholic
Church in England, she heavily persecuted and executed many English Protestants,
earning the title "Bloody Mary”. More than 800 English scholars fled to
Europe to escape her Catholic wrath. They gathered in Geneva Switzerland in
1557 and proceeded to produce a new Protestant version of the Bible.

The Geneva Bible reflected the thinking of a
movement of the time known as Calvinism, just one among several emerging protestant
sects, including the Lutherans, Presbyterians and Episcopalians. The Geneva
Bible was considered to be a threat to all Christianity by the bishops of the
Church of England because it replaced the government of the church by bishops,
with government by lay elders. After Bloody Mary’s death, her half-sister
Elizabeth became Queen. She was a Protestant and as Queen, the head of the
Church of England. With her blessings, the bishops of the Church of England,
denounced the Roman Catholic Bible and the Geneva Bible as heretical and
produced their own version, which became known as the Bishops' Bible. Produced under the authority of the Church of
England in 1568, the Bishop's Bible succeeded Henry the Eighth’s “Great Bible”
as the official Bible of the Church of England. The Bishop’s Bible was
substantially revised in 1572, and with minor changes in the spelling of some Hebrew
names in 1602, it was used as the base text for the King James Version (KJV) of
the Christian Bible completed in 1611.

If this were anything but the Bible, no one
would imagine that the KJV could possibly be the unaltered word of God as given
to the Jews in the Torah and the unaltered Gospel as spoken by Jesus in the
form of the New Testament. The KJV is a version of original Christian and
pre-Christian scriptures, filtered through several secular interpretations, and
all of them that occurred after the scholarly interpretations of Origen, who
from all reports was a deeply spiritual man, were for political purposes and
ego-based agendas whose instigators were far from virtuous.

The KJV’s twisted past was completely unknown to
most of the fundamental Christians in the USA of my childhood and teen-age
years (1936 – 1955), and probably to most of the Protestants around the world.
I remember statements of some of the good people of the hill country where I
grew up when told about the history of the translations of the Bible, were
asked how they knew the KJV Bible was the original word of God. They said something
like: “Yes, Priests, Kings and scholars may be less than perfect, but the
changes and interpretations were guided by God and God would not allow his word
to be distorted. The KJV is the only true word of God.” I thought: “Why would
God choose power-hungry politicians, murders, ego-maniacs, atheists,
adulterers, and sinners of every sort to shape His word, instead of honest
scholars and spiritual people?” But, I didn’t say it, because I knew what their
answer would probably be: “God works in mysterious ways!” There just is no
arguing with that kind of logic!

The Koran, the Holy Book of Islam

A brief look into the history of the organized Roman Catholic and
Protestant Bibles has shown us that any argument for or against reincarnation
based upon specific wordings in the Latin or English versions of the Bible are
questionable, and the same can be said for arguments against reincarnation by
Muslims based on verses of the Koran. The root word of Koran (in Arabic القران) is either ‘Q’ar’,
meaning to collect, or ‘Q’ara’, meaning to recite. Both of these roots seem to
fit the facts of the origin of the Koran because the Islamic Sacred Scriptures
were not written down by Mohamed, but recited from memory. Several years after
the Prophet died, his followers began jotting their memories of the recitations
they had heard on camel bones and scraps of paper, and at some point, they were
collected and hand-copied and bound into the form of a book.

According to Muslim belief, the revelation of the Koran (also spelled ‘Quran’
in English to approximate the guttural sound of the Arabic consonant) began in
610 AD, when the angel Gabriel (Arabic:
جبريل, Jibrīl or جبرائيل, Jibrāʾīl) appeared to Muhammad in Hira Cave
near Mecca, reciting to him the first verses
of SuraIqra (al-`Alaq). Throughout his life, Muhammad
continued to recite revelations until his death in 632. The Quran as it exists today
was compiled into a book format by Zayd ibn-Thabit and other
scribes under Uthman, the third Caliph, a political leader of the Islamic
Caliphate, a theocratic government, sometime between 644 and 656. This was
about 100 years after the reign of Emperor Justinian of Rome, and about 450
years after Origen of Alexandria translated the original scriptures of the
Torah and the collected sayings of Jesus and wrote his interpretations of the
scriptures, much of which became the basis of the Christian Bible as it began
its torturous transformation into the Bible we have today.

Faith-based arguments are not scientifically valid arguments. They can be
accepted as true only if the tenants
of the faith in question are accepted, either on the basis of personal
experience, or by accepting the authenticity of someone else’s experience and
the authority of an institution established by them. So, as a scientist, I must
remain skeptical of such arguments. This doesn’t mean that I reject the
teachings of Jesus. I certainly do not. On the contrary, I believe Christ Consciousness
is real, and that it is the only road to Cosmic Consciousness. But, faith is
not a basis for proof, believing is not knowing, and science must prove the
reality of something before announcing it as truth. A scientist cannot accept a
concept as indisputable truth based on someone else’s experience or belief. A
scientist must have direct proof. Without direct proof, an idea, however
appealing, is just a hypothesis; a theory to be tested, nothing more.

Unless you have direct two-way communication with Christ, you have no proof
and must rely on hear-say and very questionable authority, because Jesus, like
Mohamed, wrote nothing down. Neither did Gautama Buddha. Isn’t this remarkable?
Is it possible that the founders of three major world religions were
illiterate? No. They wrote nothing down because they knew that words in any
language, misrepresent and distort as much as they reveal. Their revelations of
the truth were much more complete, and on a much deeper level of consciousness
than can ever be conveyed in words. It was their inspiring presence and
extraordinary spiritual energy that convinced their followers that they knew
the Truth, as much or more than the words they spoke. So, let’s leave
faith-based “proofs” behind and move on to non-sectarian arguments against the
idea of reincarnation. Can science prove or disprove the reality of
reincarnation?

Non-Faith-Based
Arguments

The most convincing non-sectarian arguments against reincarnation come
from those scientists who are materialists, atheists or agnostics. These groups
are not mutually exclusive, but they are not synonymous either. A materialist
can believe in God as a higher intelligence emerging from an evolving physical
universe, and an agnostic, by definition, accepts the possibility of the
existence of a higher intelligence, but remains skeptical until he or she sees
proof. Atheism, on the other hand, is the completely negative position that
there never was a god, is no god, and never can be a god. Obviously, this is a
belief, not a scientific hypothesis, because it cannot be proved or disproved.

Rational arguments put forth by materialistic, agnostic, and atheistic
scientists boil down to two positive statements:

1.Reincarnation produces an unreconcilable paradox of
numbers

2.There is no credible evidence

Is There a Paradox of Numbers?

The fact that there are many, many more people alive on the planet today
than at any time in the recorded past, is given by some skeptics as an argument
against reincarnation, and at first glance it may seem like a good argument.
However, on closer examination, it does not eliminate reincarnation as a
logical possibility because even if there were only a finite number of souls,
say 10 billion, the assumption that all of them would eventually be on the
planet at the same time is unwarranted. Also, many more people have died during
the recorded past than exist on Earth today, so it is logically possible that
everyone alive today may have lived before. So, there is no paradox of numbers.

Science is by definition, a search for truth. To determine whether an idea
is true, false, meaningless, or beyond our ability to determine, a scientist
must first frame it in the form of a hypothesis that may be falsified, like
William James’ statement “all crows are black”. We can do that with the
question of whether reincarnation is a reality or just wishful thinking with
the following hypothesis:The
consciousness of an individual sentient being is wholly produced by that
individual’s physical body and brain, and cannot exist without them.
If
this hypothesis is true, then when the body and brain of an individual cease to
function, or when they are destroyed, by whatever means, the consciousness of
that individual is simply gone. It can no longer exist, period. But, as
professor James pointed out, there is no need to look at all of the arguments
that may be made supporting this hypothesis. If there is even one counter
example, the hypothesis is invalid.

Evidence for Reincarnation

The strongest rational argument for reincarnation is based on extending
the logic of the laws of cause and effect and conservation of substance, which
apply to mass and energy, to include consciousness. The discovery of the
existence of the impact of consciousness as gimmel in every stable structure in
the universe establishes the link between mass, energy and consciousness,
suggesting that consciousness is subject to conservation and cause and effect.
But the final establishment of the reality of reincarnation depends on the
documentation of indisputable evidence.

Scientific Evidence

The largest body of scientific evidence of
the transmigration of souls is found in the life’s work of Dr. Ian Stevenson (1918-2007). Dr. Stevenson was a professor and research
psychiatrist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for 50 years. He
was Chair of the Department of Psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, the Carlson
Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and a Research Professor of
Psychiatry from 2002 until his death. He was also the founder and Director of
the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.

Dr. Stevenson is
internationally recognized for discovering and documenting evidence that
memories and physical injuries can be transferred from one lifetime to another.
He traveled extensively over a period of 40 years, investigating approximately 3,000
cases of children around the world who recalled having past lives. His
meticulous research revealed evidence that children who recalled past lives
also had unusual abilities, illnesses, phobias and familiarities which could
not be explained by the experiences and environments of their current lives or
heredity. The following is a summarization of one of the cases investigated and
documented by Dr. Stevenson.

The Case of Swarnlata Mishra

Swarnlata Mishra started
talking aboutmemories of a previous
life when she was 3 years old. Her memories contained many details that enabled
Dr. Stevenson to locate the family of the deceased person she said she
remembered being, and in the course of the investigation, she remembered more
than 50 specific facts that were verified. Her case was different than many of Dr. Stevenson’s investigations in that
her memories were happy memories rather than memories of violent and traumatic
events, and they did not fade away as she grew older.

Swarnlata Mishra was born in Pradesh India in 1948. When she was just three
years old, she told her father about her previous life in the town of Katni
more than 100 miles from their home. She related many details of her previous life
in Katni. She said her name was Biya Pathak, and that she had two sons. She recalled
details of their home in Katni, including the following: It was white with
black doors fitted with iron bars; four rooms were stuccoed, but other parts
were less finished; the front floor was of stone slabs. The house was in in the
Zhurkutia, District of Katni; behind the house was a girl's school, in front
was a railway line, and lime furnaces were visible from the house. She added
that the family had a motor car (a very rare item in India, even in the 1950's,
and especially before Swarnlata was born). Swarnlata said Biya died of a
"pain in her throat" and was treated by Dr. S. C. Bhabrat in
Jabalpur. All of these details, written down when Swarnlata was three, and they
were verified later when Swarnlata was 10 years old and they actually traveled
to Katni. Until then, the two families were unaware of each other’s existence.

After learning of Swarnlata’s claims, In the
summer of 1959, Biya’s husband, son and eldest brother traveled to the town
where the Mishras lived with the intention of testing her to see if she really
was a reincarnation of their Biya. They enlisted nine strangers to accompany
them to the Mishras’ home to pose as friends or family members that Biya had
known well. Ten-year-old Swarnlata quickly picked the real family members from
among the imposters and stopped in front of Biya’s husband, lowering her eyes
as Indian wives do in the presence of their husbands. Many other factual
verifications in this case, hard to explain by any theory other than
reincarnation, are found in the case files and in Dr. Stevenson’s book, “Twenty
Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation”, University Press of Virginia. Also see
“Children Who Remember Previous Lives” written for the layperson, McFarland
& Company, Inc., Publishers, 2001.

Could this case be a “white crow” disproving the hypothesis that: The
consciousness of an individual sentient being is wholly produced by that
individual’s physical body and brain. If you accept the work of Dr. Stevenson,
a scientist whose work in other areas is not questioned, with the same level of
skepticism exhibited by a particle physicist reviewing the evidence for the
existence of the Higgs boson, then you would have to say that it is. Critics of
Dr. Stevenson’s reincarnation investigations like the phrase “extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence” made popular by Carl Sagan; but just how
extraordinary does the evidence have to be? I submit that for most of the
critics of the study of reincarnation, no amount of evidence will ever be
enough, because, their objections are not scientific, they are belief-based,
derived either from a religious faith, or from a belief in simplistic
scientific materialism. Dr. Stevenson documented some 3,000 cases, most of
which are very difficult, if not impossible to explain any other way.

Why is reincarnation considered to be an extraordinary claim? How can
something that is a fundamental belief of 1.4 billion people (Hindus,
Buddhists, Jains, Taoists, Sikhs, and Shinto followers) be “extraordinary”? It
is considered extraordinary mainly in western cultures, but, according to data released by the Pew Forum on Religion
and Public Life from a 2009 survey, 24 percent of American Christians believe
in reincarnation.

Credible
Evidence from Adults

Dr. Stevenson’s files on reincarnation
primarily contain cases of children who report having memories of past lives.
The reason Dr. Stevenson focused on children is easy to understand. As a
scientist born, raised and trained in a society and scientific community that
largely rejected the idea of reincarnation on the basis of religious dogma
and/or materialism, in order to undertake a serious Investigation of the
reincarnation hypothesis, he had to behave as a true skeptic and allow the
possibility that the hypothesis might be in fact, either true or false. If
true, the most likely place to find evidence would be in the newly born. As a
medical doctor and psychiatrist, he knew that the clarity of the memory of an
event generally fades with the passage of time; and therefore, if it is
possible that some people live more than one life, and if it is possible that
some memory of past life events stored in the brain of the deceased can carry
over into the brain of the newly born body, then it is most likely to surface
shortly after birth, and to be expressed by the child as soon as he or she
begins to talk.

If such memories occur, they are likely to
fade with time, and become categorized as dreams by the individual and others,
as the body and mind go through the overwhelming stages of growth, including
the emotions of puberty, and the influences of other people. Also, an adult may
suppress or exaggerate such memories, depending on his societal conditioning
and beliefs. As a scientist, Dr. Stevenson was breaking new ground for western
science, so he could not allow preconceived beliefs or opinions about why, or
how reincarnation might occur, affect the investigations. This explains why Dr.
Stevenson focused primarily on reports of other-life memories by children. But,
are there adults who claim to remember past lives?

Some Famous People Who have professed
belief in Reincarnation

The list of 25 famous people below is only a
partial list, consisting ofquotes that
are readily available from public statements and published writings. There are
many more who believe in reincarnation as completely logical, or from direct
experiences remembered in this life.

Benjamin
Franklin

“When
I see nothing annihilated (in the works of God) and not a drop of water wasted,
I cannot suspect the annihilation of souls, or believe that He will suffer the
daily waste of millions of minds ready-made that now exist, and put Himself to
the continual trouble of making new ones. Thus, finding myself to exist in the
world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist; and, with all
the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition
of mine, hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.”

Henry
Ford

“I
adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty-six. Religion offered
nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work
is futile if we cannot utilize the experience we collect in one life in the
next. When I discovered Reincarnation, it was as if I had found a universal
plan I realized that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no
longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. Genius is
experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit
of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they
know more. The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve
a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I
would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life
gives to us.”

- The San
Francisco Examiner, 1928

General
George S. Patton

American World War II general spoke of memories of
a number of past lives There are numerous reports of General Patton talking
about being reincarnated. He believed that he had always been a warrior
in one form or another. During World War I, he told his mother that he had
been reincarnated. Later in life, he said: “So
as through a glass and darkly, the age long strife I see, Where I fought in
many guises, many names, but always me.”

Paramahansa Yogananda

The founder of Self-Realization Fellowship wrote
in his Autobiography of a Yogi”:

“I find my earliest memories covering the
anachronistic features of a previous incarnation. Clear recollections came to
me of a distant life in which I had been a yogi amid the Himalayan snows. These
glimpses of the past, by some dimensionless link, also afforded me a glimpse of
the future.”

Salvador
Dali

The famous Spanish artist remembered several of
his previous lives. He spoke of being St. John of the Cross in a previous life:
“as for me, … I am also the reincarnation of one of the greatest of all Spanish mystics, Saint John of the Cross.
I can vividly remember my life as Saint John . . . of
experiencing divine union, of undergoing the dark night of the
soul . . . I can remember many of Saint John’s fellow
monks.

Shirley
McLaine

On her website, Shirley
says: “When I walked across Spain on the pilgrimage called the Santiago de
Compostela Camino, I encountered myself in a former life. I discovered a
part of me that lead to a greater understanding of myself. I also realized the
karmic importance of some of the people that have been close to me in this
existence. These realizations, and numerous others, have helped, inspired and
added to my whole being. They have assisted in my better understanding myself
and those around me. It doesn't matter if this type of realization is
imagination or if it is memory. It is a truth that I have experienced on some
level, in some form of reality and I embrace it as a gift from the Divine.

Three quarters of the
Earth's people believe they have lived before and will live again; thereby
enabling their Soul's journey a continuous learning experience. Stories abound
regarding how people find each other again - for good or otherwise.”

Sylvester
Stallone
Sly Stallone is sure he had at least four past lives, and he experienced a
gruesome end in one of them. In an interview early in his career, he said, “I’m
quite sure I lost my head in the French Revolution.” His success with his
screen persona Rocky Balboa may have something to do with Stallone’s
claim that he was actually once a boxer who was killed by a knockout punch in
the 1930s.

John
Lennon

“I’m not afraid of death because I
don’t believe in it. It’s just getting out of one car, and into another.”

George Harrison"Friends are all souls that we've known in
other lives. We're drawn to each other. Even if I have only known them a day.,
it doesn't matter. I'm not going to wait till I have known them for two years,
because anyway, we must have met somewhere before, you know."

Edgar Cayce

According
to those who knew the ‘Sleeping Prophet’ and studied his readings, “Edgar Cayce found that the concept of reincarnation was
not incompatible with any religion, and actually merged perfectly with his own
beliefs of what it meant to be a Christian. Eventually the subject of
reincarnation was examined in extensive detail in over 1,900 Life Readings.”

Mark
Twain

From his autobiography: “I have
been born more times than anybody except Krishna.”

Carl Jung

"This
concept of rebirth necessarily implies the continuity of personality. Here the
human personality is regarded as continuous and accessible to memory, so that,
when one is incarnated or born, one is able, at least potentially, to remember
that one has lived through previous existences, and that these existences were
one's own, i.e., that they had the same ego form as the present life. As a
rule, reincarnation means rebirth in a human body.

"What happens
after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do
not suffice to form even an appropriate conception of it... The dissolution of
our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning."

William James

Renowned American
psychologist and philosopher, William James delivered a significant
science-based lecture, called "Human Immortality", at Harvard, in
1893. He later expanded his concepts to specifically include reincarnation. On
this he wrote:

"... I am the same personal being who in old times upon the earth
had those experiences."

Ralph
Waldo Emerson

"The soul comes from
without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it
anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal.,, It is the secret of the world
that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from site and
afterward return again... Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive; nor John,
nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them
all, and could easily tell the names under which they go."

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau wrote in
"Letters":"I lived in Judea eighteen
hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among
my contemporaries."

Jack London

London, author, best known for
book “Call of the Wild”, wrote:"I did not begin when I was born, nor when
I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads
of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in
me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born."

Walt
Whitman

In "Song of Myself", the famous
poet wrote:"And as to you,
Life, I reckon you are the leaving of many deaths, (No doubt I have died myself
ten thousand times before.)"

Albert
Schweitzer

"Reincarnation contains a
most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought
surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe."

Thomas H. Huxley wrote in "Essays Upon Some
Controverted Questions":"I am certain
that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return
a thousand times."

Voltaire"It is not more
surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is
resurrection."

Arthur Schopenhauer"Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition
of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which
is haunted by the incredible delusion
that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first
entrance into life."

Napoleon
Bonaparte

The “Little” Emperor believed that he had been
born many times. He is reported to have discussed who he had been in
previous lives with many people. Napoleon died in 1821. Twenty-eight years
later, Adolf Hitler was born. Both men tried to take over Europe using the
same methods, fought Russia to a loss, and were defeated in nearly the same
way. Both were also considered to be the anti-Christ during and after
their lives by many people. Could it be that Hitler was his next
incarnation?

Cicero

A Roman Nobleman (106 B.C. - 43 B.C.) who is
considered one of the great philosophers of that time. In his composition,
"On Old Age", he wrote:

"The soul is
of heavenly origin, forced down from its home in the highest, and, so to speak,
buried in earth, a place quite opposed to its divine nature and its immortality...
It is again a strong proof of men knowing most things before birth, that when
mere children they grasp innumerable facts with such speed as to show that they
are not then taking them in for the first time, but remembering or recalling
them."

Josephus

(Well-known Jewish historian from the time of
Jesus)"All pure and holy spirits live on in
heavenly places, and in course of time they are again sent down to inhabit
righteous bodies."

Jesus of Nazareth

Perhaps most stunning of
all for Christians, is evidence that Jesus believed in reincarnation. We know
from the writings of Origin and others that Jesus spoke about reincarnation and
that it was recorded by his followers. But these records were banned from the
Bible by the Roman Emperor and others for philosophical and political reasons.
Under the edict of Justinian, monastic scribes expunged overt references to
reincarnation from the scriptures, but some reincarnation references by Jesus
that could be explained as specialcircumstances, were left in. For
example, from Luke 9:18 – 21. [My comments are italicized
in brackets]

And it came to pass,
as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him: and he asked them,
saying, whom say the people that I am?

They, answering said,
John the Baptist; but some say, Elijah; and others say, that one of the old
prophets is risen again.

[This is a clear reflection of the fact that the Jewish people in Jesus’
time believed in reincarnation]

“But what about
you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Peter answered, “God’s
Messiah.”

And he straitly charged them, and commanded them to tell
no man that thing

[Jesus was asking these questions
in order to establish with his followers that he was the Messiah predicted in
the Jewish Book of Prophets.]

And in Matthew 17:10-13:

And the disciples asked him, saying, “Why
then do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?” But he answered them and
said, “Elijah indeed is to come and will restore all things. But I
say to you that Elijah has come already, and they did not know him, but did to
him whatever they wished. So also shall the Son of Man suffer at their
hand.” Then the disciples understood that he had spoken of John the
Baptist.

[A clear
reference to the reincarnation of Elijah as John the Baptist. And the statement that “Elijah
must come first” (before the Messiah) is referring to the prophecies in the
Tanakh.]

In the Old Testament
(Extracted and translated from the Hebrew of the Jewish Tanakh):

And fifty men of the sons of the prophets went
and stood to view afar off: and they two stood by the River Jordan. And Elijah
took his mantle, and wrapped it together, and smote the waters, and they
were divided hither and thither, so that they two went over on dry ground.

And it came to pass, when
they were gone over, that Elijah said unto Elisha, “Ask what I shall do for
thee, before I be taken away from thee.” And Elisha said, “I pray thee, let a
double portion of thy spirit be upon me.”

And he said, “Thou hast asked a hard thing: nevertheless,
if thou see me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so unto thee; but
if not, it shall not be so.” And it came to pass, as they still went on,
and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses
of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into
heaven. And Elisha saw it.

(Second Kings, 2:9)

[Elijah was
reincarnated as John the Baptist. Could it be that Elisha, with twice the
spiritual power as Elijah, was reincarnated as Jesus?]

In Malachi, the last book
of the Old Testament, we find the prediction:

Behold, I am going to send you
Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the LORD.
(Malachi 4-5)

[It is no
coincidence that the Jordan River played a central role in both the elevation
of Elisha by Elijah and the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. In the
scriptures, the River Jordan symbolizes the crossing of a barrier and the
transcendence of Spirit over matter. I visited
the spot where John baptized Jesus in 2010, and have memories of standing on
the banks of the River Jordan in more than one life.]

In addition to the texts
that became the Christian Bible, texts written around and shortly after the
time of Jesus by a group called “Gnostics” also recorded the sayings of Jesus,
but because they contained some things the religious institutions of that time
did not want propagated, they were banned as either too Jewish on the one hand,
or too Christian on the other.

Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: γνωστικός, gnostikos, "having
knowledge", from γνῶσις gnōsis, knowledge) is the name
given to the ancient religious ideas of Jewish-Christian groups in the first and second century AD. The earliest Christian sects from the time of Jesus
believed in the Gnostic doctrine of emanation from one eternal Source: the idea
that all individuals have their origin in God, and all have, in their inmost
being, an eternal spark of God. They believed that the material world is created by emanations from God,
and that there exists within each human body a Divine spark that can be
gradually liberated in the course of lifetimes by the attainment of gnosis,
i.e., true knowledge.

Gnostic Christians taught that periodic saviors of
the world, from Krishna to Christ, were able to rekindle the divine spark in
those in whom it had gone out. But organizers of the political doctrine that
became the basis of the Catholic Church held that man was created by God as a
physical being, not a spiritual one. Man, therefore, has no
intrinsic connection to God, no divine spark through which he can reach God
according to Church doctrine.

Rejecting thepart of original
Christian teachings that held that the soul is spiritual and immortal, an idea
thatChurch Fathers like Clement of Alexandria and Origen documented,
misguided Church theologians developed the concept of creatio ex nihilo, or
creation out of nothing. This belief in something from nothing is reflected in
the belief in the big-bang theory of the origin of all things as originally
posited by physicalists.

Thanks to the Emperor Justinian, and the Catholic
Church that accepted his decree designed to suppress ideas that elevated the
potential of the consciousness of human beings to cosmic consciousness, that
doctrine persists to this day. The New Catholic Encyclopedia says:

"Between Creator and creature there is the
most profound distinction possible. God is not part of the world. He is not
just the peak of reality. Between God and the world there is an abyss....To
be created is to be not of itself, but from another. It is to be
non-self-sufficient. This means that deep within itself [the soul] is in a
condition of radical need, of total dependence.... It means to accept the fact
that the world has no reality except what the Creator thinks and
wills." (Emphasis added.)

In other words, according to institutionalized
Church doctrine, there is not, as the Platonists believed, a great chain of
being linking the creation to the Creator and enabling the creation to return
to the Creator. There is no divine spark inside each heart. God created
everything to run on its own, without any further involvement on his part. This
dogma allowed the Church to promote itself as the only path to salvation of the
soul.

But, this enforced doctrine of the Church contradicts
several Biblical passages like Psalms 82:6:

“I have said,
Ye are gods; and all of you are children of
the most High.”

John 10:32-34: When a
mob threatened to stone him,

Jesus answered them, “Many
good works have I shewed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye
stone me?”
The Jews answered him, saying, “For a good work we stone thee not; but for
blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.”

Jesus
replied, "Is it not written in your Law: 'I have said you are gods' ?

Jerimiah
1:4-5: Concerning the
pre-existence of souls:

Then the
word of the LORD came to me saying:

“Before I formed thee in the
belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified
thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations”.

Conclusions Regarding the
Reincarnation Hypothesis

The weight of evidence, in
terms of the number of highly intelligent people, past and present, who believe
in reincarnation, and the numerous cases of remembered past lives with
validated details, far outweighs the anti-reincarnation dogma of the Catholic
and Protestant Churches that are based on non-Christian ideas institutionalized
purely as social and political agendas.

The idea that there might be a certain finite number of souls stems from
the illusion of finite forms with beginnings and ends. Because we become identified
with finite physical bodies, and inhabit them for a while, physical bodies that
are born, grow, decay, and die, we forget that we are immortal souls. While,
because there are a finite number of organic life- supporting bodies at any one
given point in time, and there are a finite number of souls incarnate on the
Earth, we forget that the matrix of Primary Consciousness from which we come is
infinite, and can project any number of souls into the physical universe at any
given time. But, is all this proof that you or I, or any person currently alive
has actually lived before?

An Overview of the Reincarnation of Souls Hypothesis

Reading the writings of reincarnated souls that we have not met in this
lifetime, and talking with those that we have met, we can begin to piece
together a picture of how reincarnation works. The mechanism and driving force
behind it is spiritual evolution, not physical evolution, and the logic of the
mechanism is as mathematical and irrefutable as the dimensionometric
mathematical logic that reveals the existence of gimmel, the spiritual aspect
of physical creation.

There are ‘old’ souls, as we saw above, like Paramahansa Yogananda, Mark
Twain, Salvador Dali, Edgar Cayce, the Dahli Lama, and there are ‘younger’
souls, like Sylvester Stallone and George Harrison, and there are many, many
‘young’ souls who do not remember past lives at all. The terms ‘Old’ and ‘young’
in this context, do not necessarily relate to time spent on this Earth, but to
lessons learned. It appears that progression and regression in a given lifetime
- or lifetimes, are the results of the desires, choices, actions, and focus of
the soul in question.

The law of cause and effect, or karma, as it is called in Eastern philosophy,
largely governs the physical aspects of reincarnation, including the when,
where and how of birth, social and economic position in life and death, time
after time, but has no effect on the spirit, the essence of Primary
Consciousness, which is the heart of the soul. Finite expressions of your
unique experiences may carry over from previous lives into this one in the form
of birthmarks and other physical characteristics. Evidence strongly suggesting
this is found in the case studies of Dr. Ian Stevenson, and the documented
readings of Edgar Cayce. Deeper soul characteristics, including the level of
enlightenment attained, are also carried over, but re not necessarily displayed
for all to see in this lifetime.

If, in a previous incarnation, you attained sharply focused awareness, involving
a high level of intellect and a deep level of compassion and love, you will
recognize friends and foes incarnate in this life. This can be helpful in
maintaining and improving your focus and awareness amid the challenges and
struggles of this life. People who have attained high levels of success in past
lives are more likely to achieve success in this life also because, at a deep
level, memories of purpose, focus, and methods for attaining alignment with the
laws of the universe are still there. Unfortunately, the same is true of bad
habits. Just like physical patterns, psychological patterns persist unless steps
are actively taken to change them.

Personal Experiences Suggestive of Past Lives

Disclaimer:As a
scientist, I am, by definition, a professional skeptic. This means that I will consider
the transmigration or reincarnation of human consciousness, including my own, from
a past living body or bodies into current living bodies as a scientific hypothesis,
something that may or may not have happened. Ultimately, reincarnation must
remain a hypothesis, something to be proved or disproved by each individual.
But,
the evidence is strongly suggestive, if not overwhelming that many of us have been
here before, with another name and face, and may return again until we have
evolved spiritually to the point that we can move on beyond the merely physical, into the
much greater domain of the Cosmos.

I will, on the other hand, stand behind the declaration of the existence
of the third form, not measurable as matter (mass) or energy, because it has
been proved to be true with mathematical logic and the empirical evidence of
scientific data. This discovery supports the hypothesis of the survival of
consciousness by extension of the law of conservation of mass and energy to
include all three forms of the substance of reality. Certain experiences and
memories may be strongly suggestive of reincarnation, but it is possible that they
might be explained in other ways as well. For example: memories that appear to
be from past lives could be somatic, i.e., memories of ancestral lives recorded
in the DNA, that surface in the brains of descendants.

I have had a number of distinct personal memories and experiences that are
suggestive of past lives, some of which I wrote about in “The Book of Atma”
Published in 1977. My memories are suggestive of at least seven distinct lives
in specific past time periods. Some have been validated by physical evidence,
relevant information and unusual experiences in this lifetime. Still, they
could be somatic memories of other human beings recorded in my DNA, that
somehow, my conscious mind has tapped into. But I don’t think so. If asked what
I believe regarding my experiences suggestive of reincarnation, I will have to
say that I believe that my soul did not appear from nothingness on October 7,
1936, and will not disappear anytime in the future, because there is no
evidence that anything appears and
disappears without cause.

All of the laws of nature discovered so far, especially the laws of
conservation of mass and energy, tell us that nothing is ever created from
nothingness or destroyed absolutely, and that all things change and evolve. The
idea of the existence of nothingness is completely illogical and not supported
by the evidence of scientific data. The discovery of gimmel strongly suggests
that the same is true for consciousness. It may change and evolve, but there is
no basis to believe that it will ever cease to exist. In addition, the
existence of the complexly ordered physical universe only makes sense, and has
purpose and meaning, if the progress made in one life actually carries over in
some form into the next life. I am convinced by the evidence of experience and
mathematical logic that there is something instead of nothing because there
never was a state of absolute nothingness. Without gimmel, the laws of mechanics
and the second law of thermodynamics tell us that no structured universe
consisting of spinning objects like electrons, protons and neutrons could ever
exist.

The fact that I exist now as a conscious being, implies that I have always
existed, and will always exist in some form, as indicated clearly in the
Judeo-Christian scriptures, especially before they were redacted by the heavy
hand of Justinian I, Emperor of Rome.

Post
Script:

Jacqui plans to post
messages regarding things both mundane and spiritual revealed to her during her
near-death experiences on her YL Abundance site, and we will be posting
together on this blog as well. This is a change of focus that may be
distasteful to some who think scientific investigation and spiritual experience
are mutually exclusive, a view sometimes held by both materialists and
religious people. Everyone is free to accept or reject what we have to say,
and, of course, to refuse to read anything we post if you please. But, in my
opinion, rejection of ideas that do not agree with your belief system is a
short-sighted and misguided attitude that inhibits intellectual and spiritual
growth. Real science, e.g., should seek to investigate all real experiences and
phenomena, physical, mental and spiritual. Excluding anything for consideration
that cannot be fully explained as the interaction of matter and energy in space
and time is unscientific and ignores most of the most important questions we
have as conscious human beings. To reject ideas that are not consistent with
your own materialistic, intellectual or spiritual belief system is an indolent
choice, but one chosen by many, if not most people alive in the world today.